on the Earth. The 20th century Reform Rabbi Gunther Plaut observed that in , the people — not Moses, as recorded in and 24–25 — chose the officials who would share the tasks of leadership and dispute resolution. Jeffrey Tigay, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, however, reasoned that although Moses selected the appointees as recorded in and 24–25, he could not have acted without recommendations by the people, for the officers would have numbered in the thousands (according to the Talmud, 78,600), and Moses could not have known that many qualified people, especially as he had not lived among the Israelites before the Exodus. Professor Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, noted several differences between the accounts in and , all of which he argued reflected the distinctive aims of Deuteronomy. Jethro conceives the scheme in , but is not mentioned in , and instead, the plan is entirely Moses's idea, as Deuteronomy is the book of Moses. In , Moses entrusts the choice of magistrates to the people, whereas in , he implements Jethro's directive by choosing the judges himself. In , the qualities to be sought in the judges are moral probity and piety, whereas stresses intellectual discernment. The 1639 Fundamental Agreement of the New Haven Colony reported that John Davenport, a Puritan clergyman and co-founder of the colony, declared to all the free planters forming the colony that , , and described the kind of people who might best be trusted with matters of government, and the people at the meeting assented without opposition. Deuteronomy chapter 2 Archeologists Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Neil Asher Silberman noted that ; ; and report that the wandering Israelites battled at the city of Heshbon, capital of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who tried to block the Israelites from passing through his territory on their way to Canaan. Excavations at Tel Hesban south of Amman, the location of ancient Heshbon, showed that there was no Late Bronze Age city, not even a small village, there. And Finkelstein and Silberman noted that according to the Bible, when the children of Israel moved along the Transjordanian plateau they met and confronted resistance not only in Moab but also from the full-fledged states of Edom and Ammon. Yet the archeological evidence indicates that the Transjordan plateau was very sparsely inhabited in the Late Bronze Age, and most